Matias Faldbakken

The young Norwegian artist Matias Faldbakken (b. 1973) has received a lot of international attention. His works present a non-spectacular aesthetic, one rooted in his insistence on negativity. This insistence is demonstrated through various media such as paintings, video, installations, graffiti and sculpture. As he himself writes: 'The Eskimos have two hundred ways of saying "snow". I have three million ways of saying "no".' This artist is also a writer and creates visual artworks with references to literary texts that refer back to pictorial art. These works appropriate aesthetic styles of earlier conceptual artists from the 1960s and ‘70s. Faldbakken has, in fact, been called a neoconceptualist, as has Gardar Eide Einarsson. In recent years he has also appropriated from 1950s abstract expressionists.

Faldbakken’s visual art contains a textual aspect which causes viewers to become active readers. Oftentimes, the use of materials or the general way in which a text is presented makes it difficult to access. This, in turn, postpones understanding.

Such methods invite a multitude of interpretations. Untitled (Canvas #17) (2008) is exemplary in this respect. The work consists of bits of tape affixed to a canvas; seen together, these elements combine to create an abstraction and a word.

While canvas is clearly an important element in Untitled (Canvas #17), another of Faldbakken’s works in this exhibition consists of thin, printed paper glued directly to a wall. The technique recalls the way advertisement posters are mounted on billboards; the result is often slightly uneven due to thin paper and strong glue. Advertisement posters usually hang in places optimal for viewing, yet Faldbakken’s work is mounted on the poorly-lit back side of a wall – a place we in the museum have never before hung art. The title, Newspaper Ad #17 (2008), refers to the material it is made with, and forges an interesting connection to the thematic contents.

Faldbakken uses this strategy deliberately. With it, he gives enduring life and relevance to a newspaper ad, an item generally thought to be of secondary importance. Advertisements are necessary evils; they have no value beyond the first, immediate point of consumption. But Faldbakken first manipulates the ad to the point where it is emptied of meaning. He cuts its connection to reality, crops it and deforms it by blowing it up to gigantic proportions. What remains is a pure abstraction. The title, meanwhile, hints at a connection; the halftone screen is clearly visible and printing from the other side of the paper shines through, albeit unreadable. Bits of letters and words can be deciphered, but create no coherent meaning. Black lines, which originally separated the ad from the newspaper article, cut across the picture. It becomes clear, then, that this is an excerpt from a larger entity.

Newspaper Ad #17 belongs to a series of works first seen in the exhibition Nothing Doing at the gallery Standard (Oslo). With this title, Faldbakken alluded to his personal approach to art: a kind of half-hearted method entailing as little energy as possible, apparently. He admits that the method is unacceptable elsewhere in society. The museum, however, is '…the only institution that allows you to work in such a manner. I cannot imagine any other place where such a practice would be possible and even appreciated.'

GAF